Well, no, that’s not what I think: A rejoinder to Gerry Nicholls

Paul Adams is a veteran of the CBC, the Globe and Mail, and EKOS Research. He has taught political science at the University of Manitoba and journalism at Carleton where he is an associate professor. His new book Power Trap, on the dilemma of Canada’s opposition parties will be published in September.

Gerry Nicholls, a former vice-president of the conservative National Citizens Coalition, has written a critique of the ideas in my new book, Power Trap, without having the benefit of reading the book.

He’ll be pleased to know that it will be available at most booksellers no later than tomorrow, and that you can already get it online at Indigo and Amazon. There will even be an excerpt here tomorrow at iPolitics.ca if he is interested.

If he reads the book, he’ll also be pleased to discover that I do not subscribe to many of the ideas he attributes to me before he attempts to demolish them.

In brief, here is the thesis of my book.

The Harper Conservatives won a majority of the seats in parliament in 2011 with 39.6% of the vote. In doing so, they received a mandate for a government that promotes lower corporate taxes and less government attention to social problems, along with a steely indifference to the dangers of climate change or of increasing economic inequality.

Meanwhile, a majority of Canadians, 53.5%, voted for federalist parties – namely the NDP, Liberals, and Greens – who take a different view on each of these important questions.

An enormous poll undertaken by Ipsos Reid immediately after the 2011 election suggested that there is a significant cluster of dedicated Conservative supporters in the electorate, who strongly support Stephen Harper and his policies, and form the core of the Conservatives’ support. And there is a larger, more amorphous group, often overlapping in its views, which is divided among the three opposition parties (or four, if you counted the Bloc Québécois, which for obvious reasons, I generally do not).

Contrary to what Nicholls attributes to me, I do not believe that there is an ideologically coherent and disciplined political Left among the electorate, that needs only to be unleashed by the creation of a united progressive party. I do know, however, that there are many Canadians who chose not to vote for the Harper Conservatives in 2011. They chose a different political direction by voting for one of several opposition parties whose platforms were broadly similar on many of what seem to me like the key issues.

These voters form what party strategists sometimes call a “universe” – that is a group of voters who might be open to voting for a united progressive party.

In a proportional representation system as they have in some European countries, the NDP, Liberals and Greens would probably have formed a majority coalition government after the 2011 election. However, in a first-past-the-post system, as we have in Canada, there is a punishing mathematical penalty for those of similar views dividing among different parties.

Moreover, since the NDP, Liberals and Greens tend to appeal to similar types of voters, their real electoral competition is inevitably among one another – trying to poach each other’s support — rather than with the Conservatives they supposedly want to replace. This is what I have called the Power Trap.

This is a truth that the Conservatives themselves discovered, of course, in the grinding “fight for the right” of the 1990s. Reformers and Progressive Conservatives had to overcome strong visceral antagonisms towards one another before they were able to unite as the Conservative Party in 2003. Even then, they did not automatically win the next election, but they did reduce the Liberals to a minority in 2004. In 2006, they won a minority of their own, and they have been governing ever since.

The NDP, Liberals and Greens face a similar dilemma today. If anything, their tribal rivalries are stronger because unlike the Conservatives, they never have been part of a single party. Each of them would dearly love to achieve power on their own (with the possible exception of the Green party, which is somewhat mysterious in this regard). And yet a study of their recent platforms would show that they are not as dissimilar – certainly from the voters’ perspective — as they often feel they are.

I think that if you look at this from the perspective of the voters who support the opposition parties, rather than that of the party activists, it is plain that most of them would like an option at election time that would have a realistic alternative of replacing the Harper government with one that cared about the shrinking middle class, inequality and climate change, for example.

I do not believe, as Gerry Nicholls seems to think I do, that this would be easy. A progressive party would contain a variety of contending factions, just as Stephen Harper’s party includes libertarians and social conservatives, economic conservatives and populists.

I do not believe, as Gerry Nicholls suggests I do, that a united progressive party would, in his words, “smite the Harper Conservatives and turn Canada into an environment-loving, egalitarian utopia for all time.” This seems more like a nighttime phantasm of his very own than anything I espouse. In fact, far from being utopian, my proposal is a pragmatic one that would involve principled compromise among people from different political traditions.

Nor do I imagine, as Nicholls seems to suppose I do, that the Conservatives would be powerless to strategize against, or to attempt to divide, a new progressive party.

What I do think is that the NDP, Liberals and Greens would have a much better chance of winning the 2015 election, and the election after that, if they ran as single party instead of three. Or put another way, that Stephen Harper’s Conservatives will find it a lot easier vanquishing three squabbling opponents than a single determined foe.

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